Review: Tits or GTFO

Tits or GTFO is not poorly written. It’s actually quite well-written, for what it’s worth. The problem is that it’s not well-written as a play, but rather as a series of disconnected opinion articles you’d likely read somewhere like Polygon or Vice. Simply put: Tits or GTFO doesn’t feel like it’s written as a piece […]

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Tits or GTFO is not poorly written. It’s actually quite well-written, for what it’s worth. The problem is that it’s not well-written as a play, but rather as a series of disconnected opinion articles you’d likely read somewhere like Polygon or Vice. Simply put: Tits or GTFO doesn’t feel like it’s written as a piece of theatre—it feels like a pop-culture feminist manifesto.

And I don’t use the word manifesto in the negative sense, either; I actually think most of what Tits or GTFO has to say is incredibly pertinent to our time, and that The Mana Bar is a fitting venue for what the show’s trying achieve. The problem is that this space isn’t filled with anything enticing. I restate again that I think this is a good text—but also that it’s not a theatrical text.

As far as theatre goes, we have a girl standing by a bar, putting on different (literal) hats to tell a series of disconnected stories from the perspectives of different minority gamers. And it’s not really signposted that she’s playing different characters either—the acting and delivery style, what little of it there is, stays the same—shaky, with dozens of forgotten lines scattered throughout on the third night of the performance. And why is that? Why does it sound like a nervous Year 12 kid delivering an opinionated speech? Simply put: because it’s written like one. And with a script like that it’s hard for an actor to remember lines, because they’re not responding to anything—no movement cues, no other stimulus. Just the rigid structure of a spoken-word article.

Even when the actress switches between the four perspectives, only the worded details change. Nothing in the delivery. And so it’s jarring when the details begin to clash before you’ve even got your head around the fact that the character’s changed. Perhaps this is my fault, but I assumed she’d be exploring a different stage of a single person’s life when she first changed hats.

And I guess I assumed that because the play feels so personal. It feels like the outcry of minorities that genuinely exist within the fast-growing culture of video games. Race, gender, and sexuality are all explored here. And that’s great—post-Gamergate, they should be. But when the white actress on-stage is suddenly speaking from the perspective of an Asian girl, which is only relevant or even bought up to make one little point about Lucy Liu, you have to wonder—why? Why make this point on the stage, specifically?

Because again, don’t get me wrong—Tits or GTFO is written by someone who’s got things to say, and things she needs to say. But I’m kinda left wondering if a one-person show in a dingy Valley bar is the best way for these things to be said.